“If recent reporting on administrative decisions at the Social Security Administration is accurate, it would be further evidence that the Trump administration is determined to make it harder for Americans to collect their earned benefits. A memo from acting Deputy Social Security Commissioner Doris Diaz reportedly includes a new policy to require claimants who call the agency’s 1-800 phone line to verify their identity online, which would force seniors’ and people with disabilities to navigate a needless technical hurdle while there already are adequate systems in place to verify identity via telephone. If these claimants from among our most vulnerable populations cannot verify their identity online, they would have to travel in person to an SSA field office at a time when the agency is closing field offices across the country and radically reducing staff.
There also are reports that SSA leadership planned to eliminate claimants’ ability to file for benefits via telephone, a long available service until now, forcing them, again, online or to a dwindling number of field offices. SSA claimed that those reports are inaccurate, and that the limitations would be smaller in scope. This seems like a reveral of course once their true intentions leaked out.
These latest developments are part of a clear pattern: Elon Musk, DOGE, and their acolytes at SSA are engaged in an intentional campaign to make it harder for Americans to collect their hard-earned Social Security benefits. They have carried out this campaign under the false banner of searching for ‘fraud,’ even though all of Musk and DOGE’s allegations of massive fraud have been thoroughly debunked. (Improper payments amount to less than 1% of benefits paid and few of these are actual fraud.) Yet they continue to lie and use ‘fraud’ as a justification for disrupting operations at the agency that delivers benefits to more than 70 million Americans.
Intentionally constructing obstacles for the people who’ve earned these benefits (and who pay for SSA operations with every paycheck) betrays at the least an indifference — and more likely, an outright hostility — to the elderly, people with disabilities, their families and survivors who rely on Social Security. One has to ask why the world’s richest man — who has received in the tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts — is targeting the agency that helps so many Americans keep their heads above water financially. It’s clear now that Musk (who recently called Social Security a ‘Ponzi Scheme’) and DOGE, under the pretext of finding fraud, are attempting to undermine public support for Social Security by rendering the SSA dysfunctional, so that the program can be squeezed for cash, cut, and privatized.” There is no other rational conclusion, despite President Trump’s increasingly hollow promise ‘not to touch’ Social Security.” – Max Richtman, President and CEO, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
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